How Many English Teachers Does It Take to Screw in a Lightbulb?
I am an English teacher by trade. That’s why sometimes, when folks run into me on message boards, I get into silly disagreements with them over semantics or I obsess over the structure of an argument, demanding they clarify the criteria they based a judgment upon. When you grade close to a hundred student essays every two weeks, semantics are everything, and structure is badly needed.
But I didn’t get into the profession to correct grammar and stamp “show; don’t tell” on student papers. When I say a “teacher by trade,” that’s exactly what I mean. All too often, I’m more mechanic than educator, helping the students tinker with the little details and never quite getting the chance to help them fix the whole machine, to show them the “big picture.”
And that’s a shame, because I’m very much a “big picture” kind of guy. I chose the profession of teaching not because I wanted to talk about dangling modifiers all day, but because I wanted to enlighten students. I wanted to share with my students the profound lessons that had been handed down to me over my years of education.
In high school I had a teacher named Mr. Fish, and he was by all accounts the coolest teacher in school. He had posters all over the walls of his room featuring everything from World War 2 propaganda to Picasso reprints to some of Kirby’s early Marvel covers. And the great thing was, he used these things to teach us. He applied them to class, if you can imagine that. In the two years I had him for Honors English, he exposed us to all kinds of profound subject matter through the use of these weird posters, and through the books we read. We read everything from Vonnegut to Shakespeare without any concern for the biographies of the authors or the historical time period a novel was written in. It was all about the message.
Mr. Fish is my model for my teaching, not in how he taught but in what he accomplished. I remember so many days in that class when I just sat in awe at what we were being exposed to there. And every now and again, I catch one of my students in such a state. I’ll be talking about some short story in my Intro to Lit class, or I’ll be explaining some writing assignment in Composition, and one of my students will suddenly have a spark in their eyes. It is a visible thing at times, that moment of understanding, and those times that I see knowledge settle onto my students like dew onto morning grass, those are the times I live for. Those moments are why I became a teacher. To see that light in my students’ eyes. To see the lightbulb over their heads. To be an advocate of great literature.
And right now, I’m lucky enough to be sharing something very dear to me, my love for the medium of comics. I’m currently teaching a class called Topics of Literature: The Graphic Narrative. Like any other literature class, we read stories and discuss them; it just so happens that in this class the stories are in the form of comics. And more than any other teaching experience I’ve had before, I’m feeling like we’re always looking at the big picture. Just three weeks ago we were discussing Grant Morrison’s great stories “The Coyote Gospel” and “The Soul of a New Machine” in class, and I had more “lightbulb” moments than I can ever recall having before.
The experience of teaching this class has been incredibly enlightening for me as well as my students, because it’s shown me just how important serious study is to this medium I love so much. If we want the medium of comics to be taken seriously, then academia is a vital part of the equation. We need scholars to read and analyze comics, to pass on their understanding to others. We need to advocate comics in the classroom.
In future weeks, I’ll discuss how I’m doing that, but more importantly I’ll show you how you can do something like what I’m doing. You don’t have to be a “teacher by trade” to share enlightenment; you don’t have to be a publisher, a creator, or a retailer either. The best position to be in to share or enlighten others on the power of the medium of comics is simply to be a fan. Through your fandom, you can advocate comics on a grassroots level far better than anyone in a position of power can. And so I urge you as you read each week to take these ideas and see how you can apply them, figure out how you can become a comics advocate in your own “classroom:” everyday life.
